Multiple categories of item in sitemap.xml - seo

On my site I have items that can be in few or more categories.
Links to one item may look like (for example):
example.com/category_id_1/item_id_1
example.com/category_id_67/item_id_1
example.com/category_id_106/item_id_1
So I dont understand do I need to set all links for one item in sitemap.xml or just certain one? If only one - which one?
Which way would be more correct according to SEO optimization?

If all the three URLs serves same content it will create some duplicate content issues.
You didn't mention whether you are using a dedicated product URL or not. Better approach to use product URLs will be something like,
yourdomain.com/products/xyx-product

Related

Drupal 7 Commerce Search API

I would like to create a searchbox like the standard one in Drupal but for Drupal Commerce (1.4). I did not use a product display, but all my products are created.
Is there a way to accomplish this?
I found this: http://drupal.org/project/commerce_search_api
and this: http://commerceguys.com/blog/commerce-module-tuesday-commerce-search-api (funny english :-) )
I've tried the second one, but I don't need a price ruler. I just want to give the visitor the possibility to search through my products. Not only the title field, but also the description field and if possible the taxonomy terms. It didn't work anyway.
Need help! Thx!
I thought to create this with views, but all good suggestions are welcome.
You could disable the Search API modules and simply use the default Search module provided by Drupal, this would enable searching through nodes, users, etc as usual.
The Search API may be over kill for what you want, unless you have a good mix of variations, prices, product attributes, etc that you would like users to use as search filters (price range, per attribute, etc).

Search engines and duplicate content across two sites

I have a client who has presented the following situation:
A parent company works with two distributors of their products. Both distributors want a new website developed. They both sell the same product, so will want to share content and basic page layouts. For example, product listings will be same across both sites, as will copy about the products they provide.
My concerns here are with SEO and duplicate content. Google defines duplicate content as:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content
within or across domains that either completely match other content or
are appreciably similar.
It seems that in this case, where two distributors are selling the same product, each having a website that duplicates content, is legitimate. But, I have a feeling either site could get penalised. So perhaps having two sites would be too damaging.
Any thoughts on this much appreciated.
Thanks
If it can't be helped, it's fine. Ideally you would want to make unique descriptions and content.
As recent as a couple months back, I had a staging site that didn't have the noindex tag on it by mistake. The staging site and the actual site were both ranking well for keywords.
While you are probably fine, you should still look into allotting time for content development.

Do Canonical Tags Prevent Google Indexing?

We're about to embark on a restructuring of our Website, and we will be separating some of our customers into different groups.
Currently all of our customers visit our homepage: www.example.com
What we are going to be doing is sending customers to specific landing pages depending on marketing segmentation.
For instance, people who we know are more likely to book a hotel might go to www.example.com/hotels, whilst people who like cars will go to www.example.com/cars.
The content might be ever so slightly different (a banner or parameter might change) but the vast majority of text (copy, layout) will stay the same.
Firstly, are Canonical Tags appropriate to use in this case to direct any Google juice back to www.example.com?
Secondly, since we will be marketing to specific groups, we will not want these pages to be indexed by Google, nor for them to appear in search rankings. With this in mind, are Canonical Tags still the correct tag to be using? That is, do Canonical Tags pass on the Google Juice to the canonical page, meaning the referrer page is not indexed?
If the core content of all those pages is the same then I think using the canonical tag will work. If Google accepts the canonicalness of the pages then it will always send people to the page you specify.
What do you mean by "sending customers to specific landing pages depending on marketing segmentation"? How is that implemented?
If all that changes is adverts then why not use the one page and dynamically insert the adverts that suit the visitor?
Seems that if you don't want the specific landing pages indexed by Google, or appearing in the search rankings, then the pages wouldn't have any 'Google juice' to consolidate. In that case, canonical tags won't hurt, but I don't think they'll have any effect.
To keep the landing pages from being indexed, you could use robots.txt, as well as the robots meta tag.

Product catalogue storage in mongoDB from an RDBMS perspective

I have a product page with an URL of the form http://host/products/{id}/{seo-friendly-url}, where the "seo-friendly-url" part may be something like category/subcategory/product.
The products controller gets the product with the specified ID and then ensures that the URL that follows is correct for the product - if it isn't the user is redirected to the appropriate URL (all URLs in the shop are generated correctly though, the redirect is just to maintain a canonical URL in the case of mistyping by the user or the URL changing since Google crawled it etc). The ID ensures fast product look-up, and the part on the end ensures keywords make it into the URL.
To check the URL, I have a SQL view which utilises a recursive common table expression to concatenate the product URL chunk with the URLs of its parent category URLs all the way up the hierarchy (generally just 3 deep).
I've recently came across document oriented storage and I can see it being very useful in a variety of situations (for example, my product entities have tags and multibuy prices and attributes etc all in different tables currently).
So on to my question - how can I achieve the above functionality in mongoDB, or is there a better way to think about it? The naive way would be to retrieve each category in the hierarchy individually, but I'm assuming that would be slow.
Related: I've read in the docs that skip/limit for is slow for large result sets - would this be noticeable for the maximum of say 10 pages of 25 products each likely to be present in a retail website category?
I think your best option is to just store the full slug with the product. Then when you get the product just check to see if the slug matches and if not, redirect. Now, the trade-off is that if you want to rename a category you will need to do a batch job to find all products in the category and change their slugs. The good news is that category renames will be much less common than views (hopefully) so your total load will be reduced.
Not sure how skip and limit are related to this question, except that they both involve mongodb. Anyway for 25 results it's really no problem. Limit isn't slow and in fact can speed things up if less than 100 (default first batch size). Skip can hurt performance, but only by making it as slow as if you fetched all skipped documents w/o the extra network traffic. Therefore I wouldn't skip 1 million docs, but skipping 100 would be fine.
You can model a collection called products, with the document like:
product:{id:someId,category:someCategory,subcategory:someSubCategory,productSlug:somenameslug}
The query to get the product given the id, category and subcategory would be something like:
db.products.find({id:123,category:cat,subCategory:subcat})
This sounds pretty simpleton but given my understanding of your question IMO this should be a good start.
For your other question, there are skip and limit modifiers to help with pagination.

Good URL strategy for sitemap and SEO

I run a site where users have their own profile pages. They are also able to post products for sale (that they have made) and write/import blog posts. I am going to be implementing a sitemap and I need to make a final decision with the URL strategy.
Here's what I currently have for products (where 1234 is the product ID that I use to lookup that product):
N.B "product" is a fixed string (although it's another word in the actual site) - all others are dynamic depending on the item.
example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name
should I change to any of these? i.e:
example.com/maker/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/product-category/product-name/1234
example.com/product/1234/product-category/product-name
The main items for consideration are:
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
I think the first example (example.com/product/1234.product-category.product-name) is the best format but I would consider changing then "." to "-". I am just thinking that if somehow a product name ends in something that triggers an different handler on your server like ".php" or ".jsp" you might have some undesired effects.
Where should the product ID go in the URL? Both in terms of readability by the user but also in SEO terms
I don't really think it matters too much where the product ID goes but as far as the user reading it, I think they pay attention to the end of the line so I would put the ID first leaving the most descriptive part (the product name) at the end.
Should I include the user's name (as he/she made that product) ?
Not sure if you allow your users to change user names, but if you did I would leave the user name out. An example would be someone getting married and changing their last name. This would hurt your SEO since the URL would change but search engines would have already indexed it the old way. You'd have to put some permantent redirects in place to handle this which could be avoided by just leaving the username out.
Should I attempt to remove the ID altogether?
You should leave the ID in the URL in the event that two products have the same name and your algorithm to generate the URL creates a duplicate link.
I prefer this:
example.com/users_name/product-category/product-name/1234
However, one should be aware that the url gets too long some times. It is difficult to represent or promote in a blog or a forum. Why not simply use
example.com/1234 and use the Title to put the other details like category and product name?
Now a days, I think search engines are getting smarter and short urls are used more and more.